


Placne

by roseverdict



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Chell doesn't talk much, Forgiveness, One-Shot, Wheatley is very very upset at himself, Wheatley redemption, an actual redemption not GLaDOS style, and cranked this out in a day, but i think i did well, i fell into a fandom over the weekend, so i have no idea how accurate it is, spaaaaaaace, yes hello hi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-23
Updated: 2017-01-23
Packaged: 2018-09-19 11:27:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9438173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseverdict/pseuds/roseverdict
Summary: A freak accident in space sends Wheatley and the Space Core careening down to Earth. Meanwhile, Chell has to deal with her past screwing up her present and her tattered memories of her friend-turned-enemy. Also that one weird turret showed up at Chell’s place riding a chicken. So there’s that.





	

**Author's Note:**

> *droPS THIS HERE AND RUNS*

Wheatley groaned as his “companion” floated over by him yet again. “SPAAAAAAACE!”

“Ugh, yes, space, I KNOW! We are in this incredibly open area, far away from bloody everything we could ever know, and there’s NOTHING we can bloody do about it! I BLOODY KNOW!!!” He snapped, not that the Space Core cared.

He turned his auditory sensors off so he wouldn’t have to listen for a while, letting his momentum from-what, months ago? He couldn’t remember-spin his ‘face’ towards the earth.

Honestly, if the other one would just SHUT UP ABOUT BLOODY SPACE FOR A MOMENT, he might even find himself enjoying his view.

There was the Earth, in all its blue-green glory. Look, as it rotated, its side lit up like…well, millions and millions of lightbulbs lighting up. The clouds were a whitish cloak around it, shielding the blue insides from danger and beauty alike-

_ya know that feeling bloody well, ya do_

-and he decided to think about something else.

He continued spinning in the vast darkness, with nothing but regrets and cries of “SPACE SPACE SPACE” to fill his hull.

〜〜〜〜〜〜

He couldn’t tell how long it had been in minutes when he saw it. He had fully rotated several times between his momentary lapse and noticing it.

He turned his sound back on and called back to Space Core. “Oi, Spacey! You know a lot about space, yeah?”

“OH SPACE SPACE WITH COMETS AND SUPERNOVAS AND THEBIGDIPPERSPAAA-”

“YES, SPACE! But do you recognize that over there?”

Spacey flipped over to see where Wheatley was pointing.

“SOLAR FLARES SUN SUN FIRE BAD BAD BAD COOL BAD-” His optic shrank and started flailing wildly in his hull.

Wheatley went to access his own miniscule knowledge of the stars and recoiled.

“Solar flares…with…bloody EMPs?! You’ve got to be joking!”

It was no joke. There was a solar flare coming at them from one side and a peaceful orb of a planet on the other.

These next few moments would be completely mad.

“OI! OI SPACEY! SET YOURSELF A TIMER AND TURN YOURSELF OFF FOR 5 MINUTES WHEN I SAY GO! GOT IT?!” Wheatley had failed Chell, he’d failed himself, and he wasn’t about to fail Spacey.

“SPACE GOTTA LIVE SUN SUN ON IT!” Space Core flapped his handles so swiftly, they were a blur to Wheatley’s optic.

Wheatley himself set a reboot timer, wriggling over to Spacey and hooking his handles around the other core’s.

“Now whatever you do, DON’T DETACH. GOT IT?!” Wheatley ordered.

“GOTTA LIVE GOTTA SURVIVE” Spacey was flipping out.

With a tense yell of “Reboot!” Wheatley found himself the only one awake. He floated there, wondering if he should just let the EMP short him out. It was no less than he deserved…

No.

Chell was probably still down there on the tiny blue marble that resembled him so. Capable of kindness, but guilty of evil.

The flare would most likely send the two cores down to earth in a flaming heap, even tiny little Wheatley knew that.

Yet…

…if there was any hope to get down there in one piece and make up for what he’d done…

…it was with the sun.

He slammed his optic shutters together and started the reboot countdown, letting darkness take him once more.

〜〜〜〜〜〜

Chell came home to the same small setup she always did.

After escaping Aperture, she had managed to get herself set up with a cozy little cabin, away from people. An undefined amount of time in a facility with nobody around but robot caretakers and tiny spheres can do that to a person.

She tried to not think about that, though.

The small town-it didn’t even have a real name-had few people who even remembered what Aperture was, and they knew a war-torn face when they saw it.

It was a nice life, a relaxing life…a boring life.

Sometimes Chell would wake up, wondering why Wheatley wasn’t chattering at her to get up or She would make her, then remember…she wasn’t there any more.

He wasn’t there any more.

She kinda missed the little guy. Aside from the whole “mad with power” bit. That wasn’t fun.

The expression on his optic as he was sucked out into space…

But that was months ago.

The doorbell rang. Funny, she hadn’t ordered anything.

She went up to the door and checked the peephole.

A turret stared back at her.

She fell back, her breath hitched up into her chest, her eyes wide, her face pale, her hand twitching, reaching for the portal gun.

“I’m different…”

She felt herself come back to the present.

Yes, there was a turret out there, but-

“Get mad.”

-Chell was fairly certain it was the weird one from-

“Don’t make lemonade.”

-the redemption line, the one that really was different.

She went against her better judgement (TURRET MUST HIDE CAN’T STOP) and cracked the door open.

“Hi again.”

So it _was_ the same one.

She opened the door some more and carefully picked it up, bringing it inside.

“Twelve Jewish prisoners escaped their Nazi captors by digging a tunnel with spoons. Their original group had 40 members, but 28 of them were shot.”

Chell gave the turret a strange look as she set it down inside. Obviously, she turned it away from her things, then sat down a bit behind it.

She asked, “So, then. How did you wind up here?”

“Brian in Hatchet had to learn to survive in the wild for 54 days.”

Chell didn’t understand for a moment, then had a small realization.

〜〜〜〜〜〜

“Prometheus was punished by the gods for giving the gift of knowledge to man. He was cast into the bowels of the earth and pecked by birds.”

〜〜〜〜〜〜

“Oh, hi. Say, you’re good at murder. Could you-ow-murder this bird for me? Ow…ow…ow…”

〜〜〜〜〜〜

This turret didn’t just talk in random facts. It KNEW things!

So then that meant…the turret had escaped from There (GLaDOS was clearly The Analogy Nazis) and gone through the wilderness to find her…but…

“How did you get all the way here?”

“Chickens have been known to bond with anything.”

What?!

Chickens?!

Chell sputtered, “What do chickens have to do with anything?!”

The turret’s blank voice offered no answer, but it spoke anyway. “Sometimes the strangest things show up at the front door.”

Taking the hint, Chell backed away, opening the door again to see a hen walking around the path to her house. Chuckling bitterly, she walked over and picked it up, ignoring its indignant squawks and bringing it in with the turret.

The chicken piped down as soon as it was set down by its companion. Chell headed to the kitchen to fix up a snack when she heard Turret say something.

“In the hit game Undertale, released roughly 5 years after GLaDOS’s demise, the player can choose whether to befriend or kill their enemies. Their choices shape how they experience the ending.”

What in the world could that mean?

〜〜〜〜〜〜

Wheatley came back online to the frantic screams of Spacey and the rushing of the atmosphere as they rocketed down to the ground.

“AAAAAAAAAAAIR!!!”

“Oh for the love of-we were definitely out longer than five minutes, weren’t we, oh of course we were, the bloody EMP probably killed our internal clocks and now we’re falling to earth again-” Wheatley’s nervous babbles filled the air until they were drowned by the sound of horribly fast wind.

There wasn’t a lot of stuff to do, falling from space like they were, and they didn’t have any time to do it in anyway. Wheatley saw a nice little cottage a little ways away from, ironically, a wheat field, not too far from where it seemed the two cores would crashland.

Spacey screamed.

Rather peaceful-looking place, that.

Wheatley felt bad for ruining that pea-

〜〜〜〜〜〜

“Oh would you rather be? Oh would you rather be? Oh would you rather be your own best friend?”

Turret had begun singing the same refrain over and over again.

“Oh would you rather be? Oh would you rather be? Oh would you rather be your own worst enemy?”

Chell had pretty much accepted that whatever the turret wanted to tell her would be the only thing to make it stop.

“Oh would you rather be? Oh would you rather be? Oh would you rather be your own best friend?”

Chell sighed, looking out to the wheat fields on the property next to hers. They always helped her remember…well, none of her time spent trapped in Aperture could really be called “good,” but Wheatley had helped lighten the mood and kept her from…trying to figure out firsthand how sharp the portal gun’s prongs were.

“Oh would you rather be? Oh would you rather be? Oh would you rather be your own worst enemy?”

Turret’s song came to an end, punctuated by a projectile from the sky crashing into the wheat field.

Chell froze, gawking at the debris cloud before spinning back to Turret and Chicken (she needed better names for those two), grabbing an apple, and rushing to the scene.

〜〜〜〜〜〜

Wheatley groaned, his optic trying to adjust to the sunlight, somehow infinitely harder now he wasn’t in the deep, inky blackness of-

“Space?”

Oh yeah. He’s still stuck to Spacey.

“Oi, be a good bloke and help get us separated again.”

Spacey and Wheatley detached their handles from one another, immediately rolling away and up against the side of their little crater. Wheatley’s optic wound up stuck against the ground.

“Ugh, and now I’m stuck here in this _tiny_ little pockmark on the earth, this little bit of planet acne. Placne. _All_ I wanted was to get back and try to make up for being a _bloody massive MORON_ to Chell, but now I’m stuck in this BLOODY PLACNE SPOT WITH NO WAY TO-” His aggravated handle-flapping flipped him right-side up again to see a woman’s silhouette looking at him. “-get…out…h-hi…”

“Not space?”

〜〜〜〜〜〜

Chell was not expecting this.

Wheatley’s scorched hull shuddered as he waited for her to do something, anything. “So, uhh…you wouldn't…ah…mind…helping me out from this placne…would you?”

Her gaze went blank as she remembered that moment when it all went to heck.

_“Heheheheh…hahahahahaHAHAHAHAHA!!!”_

“I…uh…didn’t think I’d actually get the chance to…er…properly apologize. About the whole…trying to kill you thing.”

_“Actually, why_ do _we have to leave right now?”_

“…so uhm…yeah…I'm…really so, so sorry about everything, and it was all so confusing, and I knew it was bad but I just couldn’t stop myself and-”

_“I AM NOT A MORON!!!”_

“-I’m such a bloody moron I screwed up so bad right before we could get out and if I could have just stayed in control of myself it would have worked but-”

_“What, are you still alive? You are joking. You have got to be kidding me. Well, I’m still in control, and I have NO IDEA HOW TO FIX THIS PLACE!!!”_

“-I can’t fix this andit'sallmyfaultandI'msosorryIdidallthattoyou!!!” Wheatley, already a little ball on the ground, squeezed his optic flaps together and pulled his handles down, sobbing.

Chell looked down on him, the silent Space Core the only witness to the turmoil on her face.

_“Oi, luv, it's…well it’s not okay, but we’re working on it. We’ve got a plan of action for us to take, and we’re gonna find a way out of here, away from Her…chin up, please…”_

_“Ignore Her, your parents most likely didn’t abandon you. I mean there’s a small chance of it, but we saw your potato! An abandoned child doesn’t do amazing work like that!”_

_“…and then we can-oh, please don’t cry! Uhh, UHHHHH, if my database is right, crying in a situation like this is a sign of stress and hopelessness, right? Well, uhhh don’t lose hope! I remember one of the books a scientist left lying around had a bunch of really inspiring stuff in it…'And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.’ So we’ve got faith in each other, we’ve got…we’ve got friend-love, I should like to think, and hope…let’s work on that one, okay?”_

_“How much pain are we taAAAAAAUGH!!!”_

Chell made up her mind and reached into the crater.

〜〜〜〜〜〜

Back in the house, Turret spoke again.

“Forgiveness is not always easy.”

〜〜〜〜〜〜

Wheatley cracked his optic flaps open to see Spacey being pulled from the placne, then the same arms reached for him.

〜〜〜〜〜〜

“At times it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one who inflicted it.”

〜〜〜〜〜〜

Chell fell on her backside after tugging Wheatley free of a snag. The two looked each other in the face.

〜〜〜〜〜〜

“And yet…”

〜〜〜〜〜〜

Wheatley shuddered, waiting for whatever well-deserved punishment she wished to inflict on him.

〜〜〜〜〜〜

“…there is no peace without forgiveness.”

〜〜〜〜〜〜

Chell stroked the top of Wheatley’s hull, hugging him close.

“Wh-what?” He stuttered.

She bit into the fruit she’d stuck in her pocket, then showed it to him with a little smile.

Then she spoke with a voice barely used.

“A…bul…aaaaabul.”

Aside from Spacey’s random yells of “THE BIG DIPPER!” and other space-related things, there was silence for a moment.

Chell started chuckling, then Wheatley began crying and apologizing again, though this time with a generous number of ‘thank you’s mixed in.

〜〜〜〜〜〜

Deep in the bowels of the earth, a crow pecked at the wiring of an incredibly annoyed megalomaniac.

It would be a long eternity stuck down there for GLaDOS.

**Author's Note:**

> The Oracle Turret’s song is “Would You Rather” by Crusher-P. The forgiveness quote came off an image without a source on Google. The front door quote was me trying to think of something mysterious that would get Chell to get the chicken. “Hi, again” was also me. Wheatley's flashback to "the greatest of these is love" is a reference to 1 Corinthians 13:13. The rest of the references are either straight from Portal 2 or are already specified.
> 
> I’m tired ahaha


End file.
